Bring out your Dead
The sound quality of the “Betty Boards,” which began circulating in 1987, was exceptional: so good that for the initiates, it nearly reinvented listening. She made her own stereo mix on a separate feed from the house P.A. mix, strictly for posterity, and she considered the mixes from 1977 among her best. (“I want you to be inside the music,” she once said of her audio ideal. “I don’t want stereos playing at you, I want you to be in there, I want it around you.”) The Cornell show was the first widely circulated tape to sound that good.
